Today, April 10, near the Zhibek Zholy checkpoint on the Uzbek-Kazakh border, the Prime Ministers of Uzbekistan Abdulla Aripov and Kazakhstan Askar Mamin held talks and attended the ceremony of laying the capsule at the construction site of the International Center for Trade and Economic Cooperation (ICTEC) "Central Asia".
According to the government of Kazakhstan, the parties discussed topical issues of cooperation between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in trade, economic, investment, agricultural, transit, transport, tourism, space, industrial cooperation, rational use and protection of transboundary water resources, as well as interregional and cross-border cooperation.
Particular attention was reportedly paid to the implementation of joint projects in the automotive industry, processing of agricultural products, as well as the construction of a high-speed railway "Turkestan-Shymkent-Tashkent".
Following the talks, Aripov and Mamin signed an action plan for launching the Central Asia ICTEC, as well as a protocol on joint actions to develop railway transport.
Central Asia ICTEC will be located nearby the Gisht Kuprik (Uzbekistan) and Zhibek Zholy (Kazakhstan) checkpoints. The total area of the center will be 400 hectares, with 35 thousand people and 5 thousand trucks per day in both directions throughput capacity.
The center is intended to become a large industrial, trade and logistics platform for the implementation of joint investment projects of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The most promising areas of industrial cooperation are the manufacturing sector, agro-industrial complex and light industry.
It also became known that the Kazakh side expressed interest in creating a single goods distribution system between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan by opening three wholesale distribution centers in Surkhandarya and Fergana provinces with a total investment of US$ 22.5 million and a transshipment capacity of 67 thousand tons per year.
